


about today

by lunchables



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Fluff, Humor, not as angsty as the summary is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-26
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-08-17 08:49:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8137828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunchables/pseuds/lunchables
Summary: Root only shows up when she needs something.Until what she needs is something you don’t have the capacity to give.





	1. you're dressed to kill (i'm calling you out)

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place kind of in some ambiguous period post season 4, when the team is undercover and Shaw is working at the makeup counter.

Root didn’t come over often.

Well — “often,” being  in contrast to when it seemed Root was smirking around every corner on that damn bike with a second helmet at the ready, or sitting at every bar with her fruity cosmos

No, these days, Root required a particular, distinct method to her madness of showing up at your apartment at midnight.

(It was always midnight. You figured Root thought it was poetic, or some shit.)

Tonight, you were on the couch biting off the cap to another beer, the TV humming into the quiet of your living room, when a triple staccato knock from the front door grabbed your attention, that knock that you only ever heard from—

“Mind if I borrow your blow dryer, sweetie?” came muffled through the door, perky and upbeat.

You buried your face into a lumpy cushion.

Eventually, you rolled off the couch onto your feet, rubbing a few droplets of beer from your chin as you slugged open the door.

And Root stood there absolutely sopping wet, clothes and body drenched, dripping buckets onto the cheap hallway carpet.

Staring at the water stains, you pursed your lips. “I guess I can’t complain, being that it’s not blood this time.”

Root grinned. “I like to leave that area of theatricality reserved for you.”

You took another swig of beer. “Right. Well, blow dryer’s in the bathroom. Obviously.”

Root wrung out her long hair once more and shimmied a bit in the hallway before she made her way inside. “I might snag a quick shower too, borrow your shampoo, if that’s alright.”

“Nothing’s stopped you so far from using the rest of my stuff.”

Root smiled again. “What can I say, I love the way you smell,” she purred, running a finger along your collarbone. You instinctively shrugged her hand away, and she wandered off with a chuckle, heels clicking damply on the tiled floor over to the bathroom. You dipped back onto the couch, gulping another good fraction of the beer down, perfectly content to pretend Root wasn’t even there.

You were just about nodding off when Root snuck up on you, behind the couch. “Are you watching Gossip Girl?” she asked, the lilt in her voice dripping with amusement

Blinking awareness back, you shot out for the remote and hastily thumbed the rubber buttons until the channel changed. “No.”

“Cute,” Root remarked. You looked back at her, and the taller brunette had changed into one of your Knicks jerseys. You couldn’t see whether she’d donned a pair of shorts or not.

You doubted it.

“You didn’t have to stay up for me. Though it’s definitely sweet of you.” Root said softly, crossing around to drape herself over the rest of the couch, ankles up on your lap like deadweights.

Yeah, definitely no shorts.

You refused to look down.

“It’s more self-defense than hospitality. You’re too trigger-happy with tasers for anyone’s comfort.”

Root grinned. “Would a strip-search put your mind at ease?”

Your returning smile was biting and cold. “Not in the slightest.”

Root dipped her head back to the television. “Well, sorry if I interrupted your ladies’ night marathon, but please, don’t let me disturb your plans.”

Her clean, clear face was beginning to irritate you, and you focused on the discovery channel, clenching your jaw. “Every appearance of you is an interruption.”

“You know,” she teased. “Hate and love are just two sides of the same coin: passion. Your lack of indifference tells me a lot, Sameen.”

You wanted to hate her. Anger was tangible in you, rooted in your knuckles. Its predictability grounded you. You wanted to hate her. You didn’t want this… _softness_ in the slashes of your ribcage, the grooves of your chest and the breeze against your diaphragm.

It was suffocating to feel like you’re breathing clean air.

You shoved her feet off your lap and stood, your fist tight around the neck of your third beer bottle. A few stray drops sloshed onto the floor, but you didn’t care. “Don’t be here when I wake up,” you said, not looking at Root.

Conversations with that damn woman always spiraled into the middle of nowhere with nothing in its wake but itchy subtext and your hostile agitation.

You stalked back to your room and slammed the door.

You wanted to hate her; you wanted the fury. But you weren’t angry.

You weren’t angry at all.

 

* * *

 

You didn’t see Root again for seventeen days, twenty-six numbers later. This having followed a lull of muted crime ratings, even you admitted exhaustion, especially combined with the irritably tactile schedule at Bloomingdale's and the perfume headaches.

But these days, the whole team of you was always exhausted. You weren’t sure how Reese stayed standing, most mornings.

Obviously, it was midnight when Root tapped on the door.

And obviously, Root had a broken nose in need of a reset and a pathetically depressing clown suit splattered with dark, red stains.

Behind the wad of paper towels stuffed against her broken nose, Root’s voice was squeaky and stuffy. “At least I stopped the bleeding before I got here.”

You drummed your fingers against the doorframe. “I’m thrilled.”

You wound up in the kitchen, where she perched up on a bar stool, and you hopped up on the counter to examine the damage. You ignored her delighted eyes at the compensation in your height differences.

As you inspected the awkward angles of her nose, Root frowned and reached out for your face. “What did you do to your eye?” Root’s fingers were feather-like and soft against the swollen bruise along the upper arc of your cheekbone, but you deliberately cringed from her touch. She dropped her hand.

“Fusco's an idiot,” you muttered, still focused. Unlike Root and her goddamn restless affection, that need for contact, your hands never quite touched her skin. “Tried to show me something on his phone in the car. Can’t estimate his own trajectory, or keep to his own space, and his elbow is really a bitch.”

Root smirked. “What did he want to show you?”

“Don’t know. I threw his phone out the window.”

“That’s my gir—”

You deftly pressed the heels of your palms against either sides of Root’s nose and jerked it back into place. Her jaw gaped and she let out a split bitch of a shriek that rattled your ears.

Your following smile had never looked so sincere as Root cradled her face, gasping for breath.

“Fuck you,” Root groaned.

“Given the circumstances, I’d avoid such strenuous activities if I were you.” You were still smirking.

This spark was good. This was a manifest you were on board with.

Dipping her neck back, trying to find the least painful way to balance herself, Root distractedly breathed, “Oh, but think about how fun this could make our _activities_.”

Root was too busy being a big baby to notice your dark eyes wandering the length of her neck, the corner of her smooth, inviting jawline. You swallowed, the cave of your mouth dry and thick. Yeah, you’re not on board with this.

One glance back at the clown costume, however, had you clearing your throat and rummaging back through your med kit. “So. Did you get beat up by a five-year-old, or what?”

Root was suddenly embracing a physical embodiment of the exhaustion that you currently felt, slumped on the stool and bruised eyes drooping low. “She was nine, actually. But to be fair, I had my eyes on the face painter, and unfortunately the Machine did not inform me of the martial-arts-trained niece.”

You gripped the sides of Root’s face to hold her still again, her tired eyes boring quietly into you, and you began to pack some loose cotton into her nostrils. “Take these out in a couple days,” you murmured, cleaning the blood crusting around her nose. “I’d be too embarrassed to call for backup, too.”

“Thanks, Shaw,” Root sighed, shutting her eyes. You weren’t sure which part she was thanking you for, sincere or not. You saw her sink her fingernails into her thigh, clenched against the pain of your work. Her mien was expressionless, however. Calm, cool. Collected.

You wanted to hate her.

The dead night of your kitchen breathed like it was asleep, quiet exhales. Its silence was nearly stifling, but Root’s warm breath against your chin was something like soothing. It’s stillness was entirely foreign to you. With her eyes closed, she no longer surveilled your every movement around her, like she depended on your predictability, and so you let your own gaze meander again. The circles under Root’s eyes were heavy. They stained her pale skin, smeared like bad makeup. Pasty dry lips, discolored, reminded you of harsher seasons than summer. Staring at her, something tightened in your stomach, and you made a conscious effort of ignoring it.

“You’re welcome,” you muttered.

The slightest of smiles pulled at the corner of Root’s mouth, and it was a look of such open serenity that you could not resist thinking how you could stand to see it again.

 

* * *

 

A week later, Root was drenched from head-to-toe again, but this time she came up the fire escape and—

“Christ, Root, is that _gasoline_?”

Unbuttoning her blouse out on the metal grates outside your window, Root shrugged. “Christ is actually one of the few aliases I’ve never used for myself, but I’ll take it. Could you bring the trash over, babe?”

You had been rummaging through your fridge for any beer at all when that uneven triple knock had sounded on your kitchen window, and it was three quarters of a second later that had you pumping a hidden gun out of the freezer and aimed at the window. By the time you rolled your eyes hard enough to knock some nerves out of junction and you shoved open the kitchen window, the stench of the gas had you gagging.

You weren’t sure if you were stunned more by the fucking fact that Root climbed fifteen stories of a fire escape sopping wet in gasoline at midnight, or that she was now shedding her pants and was standing in the late-night air on the side of your apartment building in nothing but her underwear and a really rather lacey bra.

“Unless you want these to drip all over your floor?” Root offered sarcastically, holding up her damp pile of clothes.

You blinked, and grabbed the waste basket from around the corner. It was half-full solely from beer bottles and takeout boxes from the ramen station at the corner of your street, and now Root heaped on her rancid clothes. She smoothly hopped inside the kitchen, but she reached back out for a large paper bag that she set down ceremoniously on the counter.

“Do I want to know?” you asked hesitantly, dumping the trash down the chute.

Her smile was sly as she reached in the bag and plucked out a six pack of some expensive New York lagers. The condensation on the glass already had you drooling, and you snatched one out of her hands.

“She told me you’d likely run out at some point today,” Root clarified, still smiling like she deserved a Nobel peace prize, despite being the cause for the stench emanating off her skin in revolting waves.

Although, after popping off the cap against the counter and guzzling the brew back, you thought that maybe she did deserve an award.

“Save me one, I’m gonna pop in the shower real quick.” She patted your shoulder gently as she walked by.

But not before your eyes trailed down the damp skin of her chest, of her tight stomach, and you were caught up in her ass and those deliciously long legs far too greedily before she disappeared around the corner. Shit, the woman was covered in a disgusting, reeking fluid, and she still looked like walking sex.

You tipped back the beer again to shake out the creeping thoughts before calling out to her. “There better not be anything quick about it, or you’re not sleeping anywhere near my furniture.”

“You are more than welcome to join and oversee the process, Sameen,” she called from the bathroom, door ajar. “I could use your supervision.”

“In your dreams,” you grumbled, in a tone you thought too low for Root to hear.

“Every night, sweetie.”

You rolled your eyes, but couldn’t resist the early stages of a smile.

 

* * *

 

You were only two beers in, taking it slow, by the time Root padded out of your bedroom (wearing shorts), her wet hair twisted up casually. Again, your chest hummed… not unpleasantly upon sight of her so relaxed and at ease, so delicate, yet far from weak.

(You couldn’t quite remember when she started laying herself out like this for you, when you began to witness this private version of Root, dare you call it _domestic_. You also couldn’t find it in you to reject its dynamic.)

When she sat beside you on the couch this time, her ankles were tucked beneath herself, and you didn’t know if this was something you were supposed to read into.

Not that you were supposed to do _anything,_ for anyone.

Root just showed up when she felt like it. When she needed something, and her safe house was across the city.

None if it meant anything.

You weren’t sure if you’d understand it anyway, regardless if it did.

“Did you want to watch something?” Root asked, her tone stiff with amusement like she was trying not to laugh.

You blinked, and stared back at the dark TV, not having even realized you’d never turned it on.

Yeah, right. You’d sat in the dark of your living room for the last twenty minutes drinking beer by yourself at midnight, waiting for Root. You rolled your eyes at yourself, took another good chug, and passed Root the remote. You tried to ignore the lopsided smile that stretched across her face at the gesture (that didn’t mean anything).

She flipped around for a bit, before Root switched Gossip Girl on and smirked. “Might as well, if nothing else is on,” she said airily, her voice breaching on some heavy sarcasm. You sunk back into the couch with a scowl, ignoring her knowing look.

The couch was large enough for you to curl over on your side, legs bent at the knee, leaned against the couch’s arm, without quite touching Root’s thigh at the other end. Comfortable would be too generous a term to throw, but it wasn’t horrible.

“How’s your nose, by the way?”

Root refused to peel her eyes from the screen, too seemingly enraptured, but she tilted her better ear towards you. “Fine, mostly. Ruined a couple pillows from rolling over too much in my sleep, but it’s healing.”

You nodded, rolling your beer around your hands. “That’s good.” Another handful of minutes passed, and you interrupted the show again. “You never did tell me why you went swimming in a gas tank.”

Root had that smile again, the one that mockingly suggested a remark like _didn’t know you cared, Shaw_. “It wasn’t as bad as it looked.” You thought she was gonna leave it at that, for a bloated hesitation followed her words, but she opened her mouth again at the next commercial break. “I had assumed this position in security at an armament manufacturer over in New Jersey earlier this week, earning that all-American lifestyle, and I hired a team to break in and steal some random automatic weapons and explosives to distract from—”

“What you were actually stealing,” you guessed, and there’s a proud glint to her eyes that rubs you the wrong way.

“Exactly.” You really wished she wouldn’t look at you like… like that. “Except they got a little too trigger-happy, just sloppy mistakes that brought the gig too much attention, and I couldn’t exactly high tail it with the PAC-3 without raising any alarms in my direction, so—”

“ _Rockets?_ What the hell do you need a system like _that_ for?”

Root’s eyes glittered wickedly. “You’ll hear all about it in a few weeks, I would never leave out the juicy details.”

“I’m waiting for where you get to why you stunk up my apartment.”

“If you stop interrupting, I might get to tell my story. And technically this apartment belongs to Sameen Grey, not Shaw.”

Your eyes shot daggers through her.

“Right. Well, the team I hired didn’t know me by face, obviously, and I put on some pseudo-heroic act that had them retain me with the rest of the hostages, and as way of getting the rest of the staff and I to cooperate in their mission—”

“The mission you hired them for,” you clarified.

“—They doused us in gasoline and waved some Bic lighters around until we cooperated. No biggie. I still managed to get what I went for. And a perfect excuse to use your body wash.”

You stared at Root. “No biggie,” you echoed dryly. You wanted to back up to the part where Root was hiring sketchy teams off the market and getting that close to being on a government radar, about why Root didn’t call you or Reese for some back-up muscle, that Root had too much of a God-complex for _anyone_ ’s good, and that you _really_ wanted to get your hands on some of those military grade rockets, but it all collapsed from you like dead air. So you bit your tongue.

You polished off your beer and pushed yourself off the couch with a huff, grabbing another two beers from the fridge. The second was for Root, and the corner of her mouth lifted, and you waited all night for that stupid half-smile to fall off.

(It never did.)

You were halfway through this drink, and the episode was almost over, when you plainly said, “You’re not invincible, Root.”

You refused to look at her. Didn’t let those syrupy eyes drown you.

After a beat, Root looked back at the screen. “I know.”

 

* * *

 

You woke up on the couch, still curled up on your end, but the blanket from your bed was tossed over you. After grudgingly popping the kinks from your neck, wondering how the hell anyone slept on this damn thing, least of all Root, you glanced around for the woman reflexively. The sun had just barely crawled into the sky, and you rubbed at your eyes blearily. She wasn’t around, she never was, and you had a nagging urge to check if maybe she took your bed after you fell asleep on the couch, but you knew she didn’t.

Root always disappeared by mornings, scarcely any sign at all she’d been there in the first place aside from the toothpaste with the cap askew, the coffee maker that was still warm to the touch, the faint smell of gasoline. It didn’t matter; it’s not like you even enjoyed mornings with anything or anyone but a strong shot of espresso.

It was just something you noticed. You rubbed irritably at your neck again.

(And you weren’t sure when you became one to just _notice_ these things.)


	2. won't kiss and tell (but this isn't hell)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading :)

Twelve days, nineteen numbers, and sixty-nine hours at Bloomingdale's later, you shouldered yourself into the elevator of your apartment building on a Friday afternoon, sweating and lazy with exhaustion. It was almost five, maybe. Give or take a couple hours. The prospect of even your lumpy mattress had you salivating after the last fifty-two hours straight of tailing a medical resident at the hospital that stole too many drugs on stock for extra cash.

You lazily thumbed the button for the fifteenth floor when an arm slapped its way through the closing doors, and they parted again.

“Thought you could use some company,” Root drawled, smiling as she slid into the elevator beside you, bearing only a long coat, and a dry cleaner's bag slung over her forearm.

You slumped your head against the back wall of the elevator, already exasperated, but still stood straighter, refusing to show how utterly drained you were. “I thought vampires didn’t come out during the day.” You watched the numbers above the doors tick sluggishly.

“Funny. But I need you for something that should be long finished and over by midnight.”

“Has the word ‘please’ ever crossed your mind?”

Mimicking your stance, Root lolled her head along her shoulders to shoot you a sly look.  “I didn’t want to bore you with formalities that you couldn’t care less about, anyway.”

You pursed your lips. “Touche. But I’ve got... prior commitments.”

“Your bed won’t be your scapegoat this time, Sam. She asked specifically for you.”

Because a machine that could barely mutter a few words out without Samaritan operatives ripping chords from the wall still held the word of God.

You let your eyes drift shut. “Tell me I get to see the rockets, and fine.” An inner stretch of your muscles pleaded with you find a way to deny Root’s request, to sleep off your taut tendons and scattered brain. You were running on grimy fumes at this point, but nothing got you quite so deliciously worked up like Root’s impulsive missions, Miami ringing satisfactorily in your head.

Root’s grin was coy and threatening. “I’m afraid the PAC-3 expired its stay with me and is already in handling, but I’ve definitely got a couple toys that will peak your interest sometime.”

You stared at her, and she raised her hands in surrender. “Weaponized toys only. Scout’s honor,” Root promised.

You rolled your eyes as the elevator jerked to a stop. “Should we even be seen together, with everything that’s going on? You come over enough as it is.”

“I’m sure Martine will keep her jealousy under wraps for the night. Samaritan’s a little busy handling an anomalously large surge in relevant numbers this week.”

“Don’t tell me... the rockets?” You unlocked your door, making a high tail for the coffee pot, while Root trailed behind you to the breakfast bar where she draped the plastic bag down over.

“Among other treats, yes.”

“So, what’s the mission?” You crossed your arms, turning around to face Root opposite you. With her ankles crossed languidly and those dark eyes in dangerous par, you swallowed, and tightened your forearms across your abdomen.

Root smiled again, like she’d been waiting for an opening and pulled off her jacket to reveal a dark, navy blue dress that brushed down to her ankles, a dangerous slit up her right thigh, hugging her deliciously sharp hips, and two straps tied around the back of her neck. The modest pearl necklace screeched cliche suburban mom, but the pop of cleavage was difficult to ignore, and you forcefully blinked your eyes back up to her face.

“We have a date at the Botanical Garden.”

It took a minute to process that.

“Please, don’t let whatever is in that bag be for me,” was all you managed.

“Where would the fun in that be?” Root chastised, but she made no move to unzip the bag. “It doesn’t start until seven, but I have a few things to set in order before the gala, so I’ll meet you there. Wait for me before going inside.”

“A gala,” you deadpanned.

“It’s for charity.” Root wiggled her eyebrows. “For the New York Academy of Art. You always did have a soft spot for aspiring artists, didn’t you?

You gritted your teeth. “You owe me one, big.”

“Don’t I always.” Root took a step into your space, a hand brushing your shoulder with a squeeze you didn’t know how to interpret, before she bounced back to the front door. “Everything you need is in the bag. I’ll see you in an hour, don’t be late!”

As the door clicked behind her, you had the urge to hit something. Very, very hard.

* * *

 

It irritated you to no end that the sleek black dress you found in the laundry bag was exactly what you would’ve ended up digging up from the back of your closet, or the back sales rack at Bloomingdales, just with a couple extra zeroes on the price tag. Not to mention it actually fit your ass _well_.

In the laundry bag, you’d also found a small, black clutch that fit snugly under your arm now, with proper identification for a Miranda Kattling, born and raised New Yorker, but Root had refused to send you much else on your identity, which was moronic all on its own to go into this as blind as you were.

Your shoulders slouched with bitterness, you approached the entrance. A forest-green carpet spilled out of it like moss, photographers flashing off their static and strobe-light flashes, security details scanning the scenery like hawks on steroids. Around the security mingling about were the scattered select cliques of hosts greeting newly arrived guests through a magnificent archway, tangled with vines and flowers.

It was exhausting to look at.

You tapped on your earpiece. “Let’s just get this over with. What am I looking for, Root?”

There wasn’t even time for a response before hands grabbed at your hips, spun you back into a corner against a brick wall lining one of the gardens, and snaked over your mouth, nails scratching your cheek. You were ready for the knee to the gut, your hands already thrusting up to break a nose, but luckily Root caught your palm with a grin and pushed your leg out of its trajectory. You dropped your fighting (later, you wonder why you did at all), and only shoved her half-heartedly.

“The _fuck_ are you doing, Root?” you spat in her face, but she slowly danced right back into your space eagerly, her wicked smile never fading.

“Honey, you know exactly what I’m doing,” she murmured, looking down at you. You stared at her eyelashes as Root’s left hand dipped against the inside of your lower thigh, skittering up your skin, and the physical reaction of your twitchy hips and your skin erupting in goosebumps only fueled this swell of startled anger (directed at yourself, you later realize), as her other hand reached up to brush your hair behind your ear, and finally rest against your cheek.

You didn’t know how to push her off of you.

(You didn’t know how to want to.)

Her face was dizzyingly close to yours, gentle breaths hot against your mouth, those dark eyes locked viciously, triumphantly, with yours. That smell, the cloud of Root overcame your senses, and you blinked back this overwhelming whiplash, as Root’s hand only rose higher up your leg and under your dress. Slowly. Hesitantly. Cautiously. Like she was waiting for you to push her back again, waiting for you to reject her, waiting for your body to cringe away from her touch and not just barely inch into her hand, your hips leaning into her body.

You wanted to think you hated her, that you hated this back-and-forth game where Root manipulated this life like it was her own board, her own terrain, that she did everything within her power to keep you guessing and doubled over in surprise.

But all you could think was how soft her hand was against your cheek. Her thumb rubbed over your bottom lip, warm and gentle. She had her eyes glued to your mouth, carefully, artfully. You wanted to hate her, to hate how you drowned in her perfume. You wanted a wave of nausea to fuel a sucker punch at Root’s smug doe-eyes.

You were supposed to hate her, weren’t you?

You stared at Root’s mouth, the soft curve of her red lips, and you felt your own open slightly under Root’s touch, her fingers loosening your mouth. You couldn’t stop staring, and you definitely watched those wicked lips twist into a smirk, but you didn’t _care_ for a second, and you felt her lean in closer until she was too blurry for your crossed eyes.

And then she unclipped your gun from its velcro strap on your thigh, and she stepped a good two feet back, tossing the firearm into a trashcan. “Tonight calls for a little more subtlety, unfortunately. We go in unarmed.”

It took an embarrassing beat to compose yourself, but even when you finally did, your heart continued to hammer in your chest, continuing a surge of hormones reminiscent of adolescent years, banging through your blood system.

“You call that subtle?” you grumbled, swiping down at your dress to free the wrinkles, free the stench of Root, of her savage touch.

“A fed across the lot was eying you. Needed to make it look good.” Root shrugged, entirely unphased by her escapades. “Plus, a girl’s gotta have fun.” She took a healthier step back towards you, though less predatorily seductive as she grabbed your hand and led the pair of you out of the shadows of the alley. “While I love working you up, Sameen, I wasn’t kidding when I said we have a date. There’s been a couple tips out for a woman working alone, behind the scenes, and tonight lives off of an element of discretion that I can’t afford to lose.” She spoke over her shoulder to you, leading you back to the main throng of incoming guests. She began to trail along slower, merging the two of you into the gentle swarm drifting inside.

“Don’t leave my side unless I say so,” Root breathed, always just barely in front of you. You’d dare call it protective, with the way those dark sockets engulfed you in their severity over her shoulder. You only nodded. “I mean it. We met at a fashion show in Greenwich in 2010. You teach Latin American Art History at NYU, and I’m a Network Administrator for Realty Operations. We’ve been married for nineteen months. I connected with Gregory Long, the Chief Executive Officer here at the Garden, at a high school reunion in the Bronx, and he was thrilled to extend us an invitation, so—”

“ _We’re married?!_ ” You slapped at Root’s hand that hastily reached to your hip, as if to shush you.

“Like I already said,” Root sighed. “There have been a couple tips out for a single woman, along with a handful of rumors of a male accomplice, or two. Nothing throws off security like honeymoon lesbians drinking too much champagne at a gala dramatically above our payroll. So I’m just saying, try and play like you don’t actually hate my existence.”

You exhaled roughly through your nose, grinding the back of your teeth like gravel clung between the molars. “It’s a bit interesting that the machine _specifically_ asked for my help on this,” you mentioned, already stretching your pristine, high-end smile taut across your face as you handed your fake license to the upmarket bouncer.

You heard the smile in Root’s voice. “Darling, you certainly must know that there’s no one else I would’ve preferred to invite this evening.” Once through the security metal detectors, and with a go-ahead green light, Root took your elbow in the crook of her own and guided you both along the outside paths. “It’s not like I have many gal pals, either,” she added, smirking. “Gotta work with what I’ve got.”

You rolled your eyes. “The sooner you tell me what I’m looking for, the sooner we both go home.”

Okay, you didn’t quite mean the implied _home, together_ , and at the surge in Root’s smirk, you tried to squash it with a scowl. She only grinned harder.

“Your mission, darling, is to look pretty. We’re unarmed, we’re laying low. This is… a back window, of sorts. A basement entrance into a greater game.” She paused as the Machine murmured in her ear, her eyes unfocused momentarily, but she resumed her lock onto you. “In thirty-six minutes, we’re going to happen to stumble inside the laboratory on the west side of the grounds, just lovebirds looking for a little privacy, and we are going to get lost looking for the bathroom.”

“And?” you prompted.

Lips pursed, Root shrugged. “And if it seems we spend a little too long in the bathroom, so be it.”

You huffed, and tugged your arm loose from hers as you both walked the grounds. Either Root didn’t know anymore than she was giving, just as in the dark as she was keeping you, or she wasn’t gonna elaborate further. Regardless, you’d had enough.

The evening was lowering, the sky a dull navy of quiet night stretched across the atmosphere above you. You let the play of colors and contrast distract you, along with the gentle mutter of conversation about the scattered guests all walking towards the conservatory. Anything to think of but the obnoxious, grinning woman beside you.

“So, what do we do for thirty-six minutes, then?” you asked when you finally entered inside the round domed building where the gala was primarily being held.

“I suggest,” Root began, striding purposefully through to the center of the room. “That we have a little fun.”

She plucked two flutes of champagne off a server’s tray, holding one out to you with another daring grin.

You were on the job, technically, but this was one of _Root’s_ jobs. That standard didn’t hold up to shit when you barely knew what you were doing anyway.

Someone might call it a grimace, another could say an upside-down frown, but it was the closest to a genuine smile you were gonna get that night without a firearm in your hands, and you took the glass from Root.

“Might as well.”

* * *

 

After the third glass of champagne, it was impossible to deny that Root was trying to get you drunk, especially considering she’d barely touched her second glass, but was already handing you a fourth. Not that you felt anything but a pleasant buzz in your stomach after three drinks, but still. Root was pushing you, and you couldn’t quite understand _why_ she’d asked you to come if you were just going to be an intoxicated escort dummy the entire night.

You wondered, briefly, if Root got lonely.

You wondered what loneliness tasted like.

She introduced you — or, well, Miranda Kattling — to Gregory Long, the president of the Botanical Garden, and he was a pleasantly enough boring man. Asked about your lifelong devotion to the arts, your aspiring students, your own ambitions, and the grimace was difficult to contain.

It was enough of a struggle that you’d rather feign giggly romantic interest in Root — Sydney Kattling — than continue chatting, and you “politely” excused the two of you to a quieter corner of the gala, still inside the conservatory.

“We still have another nine minutes of socializing,” Root pointed out, as if you were eager to carry out her lame mission. Though she seemed far too gleeful as you dragged her away, both amused and charmed.

“Yeah, and another nine minutes of that moron and I’m gonna blow my brains out,” you grumbled, decidedly downing the fourth glass of champagne.

Maybe it made sense why Root was keeping you fueled. It was an outlet to keep you from strangling someone.

Root leaned against a white pillar, regarding you lightheartedly. “I’m touched that I don’t invoke those same feelings.”

You rolled your eyes, fiddling with the flute glass in your hands. “I don’t feel anything towards you.”

“So you say.” Root smiled.

“It’s not a hard concept to grasp, Root. I just don’t have feelings.”

Root shrugged. “Maybe not.” Now she eyed down the remnants of her glass, almost avoiding eye contact for the first time since… you’d known her, really. “But I still think there’s more to you than that. The mind is a complex thing, Sameen. Just because these mundane feelings don’t present themselves in you the way they do in others, we shouldn’t assume their nonexistence. Maybe it’s not a feeling, maybe it’s conveyed in another human sensory outlet. Maybe it’s entirely beyond our understanding.” Root paused, biting her lip like she was unsure how far she was stepping. You didn’t really know either, and you stared blankly at her. “But I know there’s something there. Even if it is just astounding hatred.”

At that, she sort of smiled, like she was making light of that idea, like it’d be okay if it was true.

It’d be easier on both of you if you hated her.

“I don’t hate you,” you said. It felt like an admittance. Nothing lifted from your shoulders.

Her smile perked just a millimeter higher. “It’d be alright if you did.”

“I know. Believe me.”

She finally looked back up at you and inhaled deeply, as if she couldn’t quite analyze the situation. This was foreign territory to the both of you. It was obvious you didn’t feel things the way she did, you didn’t feel towards her whatever it was that she felt towards you. It still didn’t make this… _tether_ , this sense of attachment and belonging that disturbed the air between you, any more comprehensible.

You wanted to hate her, because hate was a factual side of passion. Whatever this was, it didn’t have black and white lines. It was grey matter, a sea of grey, an overwhelming smokescreen of grey that encompassed you both.

You found you were staring at Root’s mouth, and not for the first time, you thought about how her lips felt. You don’t know how long the two of you mingled in this silence, staring at one another, trying to map out this terrain you found yourselves in.

“We should get moving,” Root finally said.

You nodded.

* * *

 

It was a rather simple job. After a fifth drink, you were a little rough around the edges on the trek to the laboratory, Root a little too happily looping her arm around your waist as you playfully crossed the grounds.

You wondered if this was what normal felt like.

She kept muttering stupid computer jokes to you, and because your buzz was breaching a bit further into a light drunken state, you found yourself chuckling at a lot of them. Mostly at how dumb they were. And with the cover of laying low like dumbfounded idiots, it was easy to call that as an excuse.

“Why do sheep like computers?” Root asked as she held  the door to the lab open. There had been a security patrol a little ways down the path before you came to the building, but they hardly batted an eye at the pair of you huddled together and smiling. “Because they have a lot of RAM.”

You snorted, and then clamped down on your nose at the escape of the noise.

Root only laughed at you, that delicious, creamy laugh that left your eyes ringing warmly.

All that the cameras inside captured were frames of a tipsy couple giggling through the halls, heads poking around corners in search for the restroom, and happening to find it on the third floor. And maybe the cameras didn’t catch you again for another ten minutes while you both crawled through the ventilation system into a lab a few rooms over, and maybe you managed to avoid any other cameras in said lab while you stood guard (a little dizzily) and Root stuck a flash drive in a computer, clicking and tapping away nonchalantly. You had long since stopped asking what Root was doing.

Once finished with whatever installation she was programming, Root hastily collapsed the laptop, snagged the drive, and swept you away from the door, lacing her fingers in yours. You let her, just in case someone saw you two at that precise moment, or something. Obviously. You didn’t think about the smooth palate of her palm against yours, her soft knuckles between your fingers, how Root’s arm twisted behind her to keep a hold on your hand.

When you were helping lift Root back up into the vent system, she looked down at you and smirked. “Why did the processor take the aspirin?” You pressed your lips together to hold back your own smile and pushed up on Root’s legs, shoving her into the vent. “Because it megahertz,” she called back to you.

Nearly on the dot of ten minutes later, the cameras picked you both back up coming out of the bathroom and exiting the facility. Root might’ve roughed your dresses up and smudged the lipstick on your mouth (“Why mess up my look, what about yours?” you grumbled, and Root stared at your sloppy lips with a dark look that shut you up).

It was a clean, simple job. You asked Root what she did on the computer, one last futile attempt, but all she offered was a shrug. You might’ve complained to Root on the walk back to the conservatory that it was an awfully boring mission, but you both knew that your discontent was insincere.

You wanted to mean it, to be fair.

You mingled a bit more at the gala, chatting with investors, some local representatives in the Academy, a couple artists looking for prospective donors, but barely half an hour later, you and Root were abandoning the party early and climbing into Root’s car.

You were fine to drive, probably, but you let her take the wheel anyways.

The drive was quiet, finally. After a night of snobbish uptown buzz, you were grateful for this serenity beside her.

When you passed through midtown, you glanced over at Root. You weren’t really thinking anything, to be honest, as you stared at her fair skin and the loops of soft, warm hair. But when she looked back at you, you weren’t quite sure what to do with it. It was that look that made you think you could weld galaxies by the sheer force of her gaze alone. There weren’t words, exactly, for that brimming of desire in her eyes.

You didn’t look at her for the remainder of the drive.

You weren’t thinking anything at all.

She pulled up to the curb a couple block down from your apartment beside an alley, out of view from any security cameras, and the engine idled. As you climbed out of the car, and Root made no move to turn off the engine, you leaned back in through the passenger window. “You coming?”

You didn’t meet her eyes, didn’t look at the pale pleasure along her mouth.

“Duty calls elsewhere, unfortunately. But thanks for being my date tonight.”

“It wasn’t a date.”

Her smile blossomed. “Sure. Sleep tight, Sameen.”

She barely waited for you to step out of the way before pulling back out onto the street, and you made a point to yourself of not watching her car disappear around a corner.

You didn’t know what disappointment felt like, but imagined it something like this.


	3. we've both lost our minds (they're nowhere to be found)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you SO much for all the comments and kudos!!! really, it made my absolute week that you guys liked this so much, and speaking as someone who struggles so much with writer's block, all your appreciation really motivated me to update this ASAP. thank you thank you to everyone that's taken a moment to comment or leave a kudos, and just anyone who's taken the time to read this. really, it means a lot. i hope to not make you wait too long for the last chapter, and i hope you enjoy :)
> 
> edit: i have a couple midterms coming up, and i have some personal doctor stuff going on, so i don't know i'll update this as quickly as i have the last two chapters, but ill try to get it up as soon as i can. this is definitely one im gonna finish :)

Only two days later, barely one number with Finch and Reese, Root knocked on the door instantaneously on point with the church bells down the block. You imagined the Machine whispering in her ear gleefully, like a child, when to knock, as if it were a game.

“I hope you’re hungry, Sam,” Root crooned through the door, and you battled between annoyance and a perk of anticipation at the thought of food.

Upon opening the door, Root stood like a Martha Stewart ad for pie gone  _ so _ wrong, her hair singed at the seams and her face smeared with soot, checkered dress splattered with burn holes and tears. And instead of a pie, she held out a ceramic dish of—

“Do I want to know what that is?”

“It’s dinner. Unfortunately for you, I’m not.”

You blinked as Root pushed past you with her… thing. “You’re not what?”

“I’m not your dinner.”

Oh, how you’d eliminate the existence of  _ so  _ many favorite, cherished weapons right then and there for your glare to incinerate Root on the spot. And she knew it, with that wicked grin. 

She dropped the dish on the breakfast bar, inside the kitchen, while you attempted to gather where your train of thought left off. “So, wait, why are you going all Stepford-wife-out-to-poison-the-husband on me?”

“By your phrasing, does that make you the husband in this scenario?”

“Root. What is that shit?”

“It’s called a casserole.”

“What, before or after Bear vomited it up?”

Root huffed, crossing her arms, and pouted. “Are you hungry or not?”

Nose wrinkled, you hesitantly poked your head into the kitchen and gathered a whiff of the casserole. Sure, maybe give her the benefit of the doubt or something, if it at least  _ smelled _ like something that might resemble food. 

After your entirely genuine gag, Root’s pout dissipated and she rolled her eyes. “Fine. Questionable 24-hour takeout it is.” She dropped the dish into the trash can before skimming through your drawer of takeout menus.

Now that you were beginning to regain your sense of smell, your eyes no longer watering, you took Root’s appearance in again. “Did you leave your head stuck in an oven, or something?”

“Good one,” Root deadpanned. “No, it was just neighborhood potluck gone wrong. I’d happily take a peek at your oven, though.” Root winked clumsily.

“Right. And so, you stole that junk? Of all the dishes?” You gestured to the casserole in the trash.

Exasperated, Root huffed, “No, I made it for the event, and I didn’t want it to go to waste. The cavalry arrived before dinner was served.”

“Do me a favor, and please never cook again.”

Root rolled her eyes, settling on a pizza menu and plucking up your landline. When she ordered for the both of you, you glowered. 

“Do I not get a say on my own food? In  _ my _ apartment?”

Root smiled, tilting her head. “I think we both can agree that I know you rather well, Sameen. That includes your pizza order.”

“Whatever. I would have asked for extra mushrooms.”

Root wrinkled her nose. “That’s also why I didn’t ask you.”

When Root swooped into your fridge for a drink, you tried not to think that she was cute, like this. That you liked how you two existed, together, in this limbo.

You didn’t really know what waited for you outside every day. You didn’t know if any brief midnight moment would be the last time you saw Root, or even jobs with Finch or John. It wasn’t fear, no. It was a space, a gap between two points like a jump discontinuity. It wasn’t something you felt.

It was an entire lack of it, if anything.

And throwing Root into there, pouting at the idea of mushrooms and struggling to pop the bottle off a beer, well, you weren’t sure that  _ nothing _ was an accurate answer to what you were feeling.

It was… something.

You hadn’t noticed Root leaving you alone in the kitchen for a shower (taking her beer with her), so you waited around stupidly, aimlessly until the pizza finally came. You were stuffing bills under the delivery boy’s nose, aggravated at his blank, dumb look, until you realized he was staring at something behind you.

You shouldn’t have turned around, to be honest, because you knew exactly what it was.

Hair towel-dried and tumbling along her naked shoulders, cheeks a luscious, healthy pink, her damp skin radiating warmth like a fucking cartoon character, Root was padding naked down the hallway with only a small towel flimsily wrapped about her body, smiling innocently at you. 

You found yourself pathetically trying to decipher if she was more messing with you or the nerdy teenager blinking like a fool in the doorway at those sinfully long legs.

With a sigh as fat as Fuco’s left ass cheek, you pressed the bills further out to the kid, snatched the pizzas and slammed the door. “Do you always have to be so socially inept?” you snapped, lifting the cardboard flap and fishing out a slice.

Root trailed behind you to the dining room table, and you really wished you’d said nothing to encourage her childish behaviors. “I think I’m pretty good at picking up on social cues. I know a good opportunity when I see one.”

You shot her a look. It was  _ no,  _ and it was  _ whatever, _ and it was  _ don’t you dare go there. _

Root’s eyes weren’t as tumultuous and challenging like they always were. There was that softness again, that lazy smile and quiet comfort. You didn’t recognize it. You didn’t recognize it at all.

“I’m gonna go get dressed,” Root decided, jutting her thumb over her shoulder. “Don’t eat it all without me.”

You would’ve eaten it all if you could, but she was quick, and Root quickly settled with you at the table, across from you, in a large t-shirt and a pair of your boxers, and she swallowed the last of her beer. 

Mid-inhale of a rather large mouthful of pizza, Root blinked at you. “What?” she asked through the food.

“What?” you echoed.

“You’re staring.”

Yeah. You were. You only blinked in response.

“Are you okay?” Root asked, though the corner of her mouth quirked into a smirk.

“Shut up,” you mumbled, stuffing more food into your open jaw.

She did, shockingly, and another blanket of silence collapsed over you. It was fluid sunlight, molasses and honey, it was quiet and warm. You didn’t know what to think of the way Root’s small smile filled the room like sound, like water.

You’ve never understood fear.

“The Machine has your back, right?” 

Until now.

Root blinked at you, head tilted in confusion at your swift gear change. 

You swallowed thickly, dropping your pizza back in the box. “Like, it watches out for you, right? It’s not gonna send you somewhere with a one-way ticket, or something.”

She gave you a funny look, not really humor, not sad, not thrilled at your words, and you couldn’t read it at all. Seeing it on her face made you want to squirm in your seat.

“She makes decisions based on Her calculations of the likelihood of favorable outcomes,” Root said slowly, carefully.

It wasn’t answer, you both knew it, and your stomach felt empty. You knew it had nothing to do with the food. Before you could think better of it, you glanced over Root’s shoulder, not meeting those merciless eyes, and said, “You’re more than a favorable outcome.” Lips pressed tightly together, your face felt a degree warmer than usual, and you swore if Root made a joke you might rip her lungs out of her chest.

“I’m good at what I do, Sameen.” You hated the way she said your name. It made your gut stir. “Great, actually. With an all-seeing God, I think I’m pretty well looked out for.”

It still wasn’t a satisfying response in the least. 

You wouldn’t look at her, and you clenched your hand into a fist in your lap. “It just would suck if you got all our covers blown.”

“Right. Of course. You have every right to be concerned.”

“I’m not concerned,” you hissed through gritted teeth. Your knuckles were white, a stark splash with your tan skin.

“Sure you’re not.”

“I’m not.”

“It’d be okay if you were.”

“I know, but I’m not.”

“But what if you were?”

“It doesn’t matter, because I’m  _ not _ .”

“Right, but, hypothetically, if you were, then,  _ hypothetically _ , one could say you actually care. Hypothetically.”

“I…”

“You what?”

“I really hate you, you know that?”

“Okay, but we’ve established that as false already, so...”

Growling, you pushed off from your seat. “You’re impossible.” A part of you hoped Root missed the small smile threatening to set loose on your face.

You didn’t think she did, because when you returned to the table with two new beers, she nursed a soft smirk of her own as she fiddled with the abandoned crust of her slice.

* * *

 

Another night, she brought  two bottles of cheap wine. After she washed the dry, crusted blood splattered across her front, you drank it on the couch together. It tasted like college misery, and neither of you made a move to turn on the TV.

“Where did you go to med school?” Root asked you lazily, swirling her glass in her hand.

Leaning against your palm, you watched Root’s motions. “Stanford.”

Root’s smirk was wider than you’d ever seen it, stretched taut and bright, her teeth glistening. “That is incredibly sexy,” she drawled, enunciating the crisp curves of her voice. “How did I not know that?”

You smirked, ever so slightly. “It was omitted from my file in ‘09.”

“What happened in ‘09?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” you remarked airily, lifting your glass to your lips and tipping your neck back.

You felt her staring at you. You knew the indented pressure of her wide eyeballs like you knew a bolt-action M40. You thought, vaguely, that thermodynamics existed solely to describe the heat of her gaze on you now.

You swallowed, tightly, and reached for the bottle.

“Sameen?”

You grunted.

She said nothing as you poured yourself another glass, so when you finally looked at her, she seemed as if she’d changed her mind entirely about what she was going to say. She was staring at your mouth, and you thought that your skull might shatter with the compulsion of how desperately you wanted to explore her top lip between yours, discover the weighted sounds of her breath with your hands under her top.

You weren’t sure what was stopping you.

Anyone else, you’d just do it.

When Root finally opened her mouth again, you cut her off. “Don’t.” Your tone was less threatening than it’d been in the past, not so heavily cruel and dangerous. It almost disgusted you how soft it was, how vulnerable. “Just, please, don’t.”

How desperate.

Root stared at you. 

She stared, and stared, and fucking  _ stared.  _

You quickly downed your glass, thought of moving to refill it, before you just grabbed the bottle. It was lighter than you’d hoped, but then again, as you rose to your feet, everything was light. Your legs felt swampish and languid as you drifted away to your room, your head bursting with air.

You didn’t know what you were feeling. You just knew you didn’t like it.

When you closed your eyes, you couldn’t shake the weight of that stare.

* * *

 

Two nights later, she came with scotch.

She needed you to teach her to cook some Persian recipe that you’d made once a few months ago, after which she’d found the leftovers in your fridge and devoured them. Root’s current plans involved seducing some Iranian official visiting the city, and you tried not to think about what her mission-oriented “seductions” entailed.

You half-heartedly urged her to follow your instructions and do it herself, but she seemed content watching you dice onions at 1am, sprinkle paprika into a sizzling pot, and she hovered over your shoulder and nursed her drink.

You’d never admit it, but there was a twinge of pleasure at just cooking with Root beside you, observing casually. It was a comfort you couldn’t name, 

“How did you learn to cook?” Root asked at one point. “Between med school and killing terrorists, I mean.”

You considered not answering, out of stubborn irritability, but you found that you didn’t care all that much if Root knew. “I used to hang out with my dad while he cooked. After he died, I just picked it up.” You hesitated, a pinch of salt in your hand, before you dropped it and let the question drive you to swallow a harsh gulp from your drink.

Root was staring at you, of course.

What else would she be doing?

“What’s your excuse for being the worst cook on the planet?” you asked dryly, instead.

(Anything to relieve the silence, the smooth quiet that you could so happily bury yourself in.)

Root laughed, and leaned against the counter beside you. “Most motel rooms don’t have kitchens. I mostly got by with pizza and ramen, and then bigger paychecks just meant better takeout.”

“So let me get this straight. You can single-handedly deploy Russian nuclear launch codes, but you can’t manage to cook a damn casserole without poisoning anyone?”

Root tilted her head, wide ass grin on her lips, hair cascading a bit too close to the stove for your liking. “I think you know me better than I know myself, Shaw.”

“That’d definitely make everything a hell of a lot simpler,” you murmured.

Root hesitated, her glass midair in its path to your lips. “What does that mean?” Her tone wasn’t challenging, or prickling. It was curious and gentle, so unlike Root and your entire relationship (yet simultaneously everything your relationship has boiled down to).

You pursed your lips, and waved your eyebrows vaguely. 

Root wasn’t having it, though. She stood straighter, and even dared so far as to reach questioningly for your hip with the edges of her delicate fingers. Normally, you’d flinch, or slap her hand away. But now, you might as well have sunk into her touch, like a craving for intimacy you’d never known.

Meeting her eyes with a lethal apathy, despite the conversation your body held with her touch, you sighed. “It means exactly that, Root.”

You wished she’d smirk, that she’d lean into your ear and whisper something horrendously stupid that would catapult your stomach down your gut, that she’d raise the hairs on the back of your neck with her heavy desire overspilling like boiling water.

Because she knew you struggled to not stare at her mouth, she knew that she dug under your skin less like a volcanic eruption and more like a hissing steam that seeped through your veins, she  _ knew  _ that you looked at her and, on some ambiguous level of unconsciousness, you felt something.

So you waited for the innuendo, the sly quip and the overwhelming lure of her sweet, low voice.

But she stepped back, her hand falling away from you, and she finished her drink.

And you’d never felt so cold.

* * *

 

Sometime once the cooking lesson had burned out a bit anti-climatically, you’d taken to the couch with the bottle of scotch and poorly written independent drama. You noticed Root’s drinking pace deliberately slowing, until she abandoned the glass altogether, but this only made you crave the bottom of the bottle more. By 4am, Root was fallen asleep beside you, curled fetally on the opposite end of the couch. You knew you’d drunk too much, especially when you waddled to your feet and needed a good handful of minutes to gather yourself to keep from falling over.

After clumsily fumbling around the couch for the remote and turning off the TV, you went to drop the remote on the coffee table, but found you were stuck.

Staring at Root.

There was a different vulnerability to her, like this. When she was awake, it was a choice, a conscious one, to open herself to you the way she so brutally did. Like the sheer naked weight of  _ what does that mean? _ or the wide truth of her loneliness exposed like a turtle on its back with  _ thanks for being my date tonight, _ tacked on top.

And here she was, defenseless entirely, no sliver of backup, just a devastating gravity of trust that you wouldn’t—

Wouldn’t what?

Kill her?

Kiss her?

But… it was the same thing, wasn’t it?

“ _ Root _ ,” you hissed, and suddenly you were unabashedly crawling over her on the couch, straddling her.

“Mm-hmm?” Root shifted beneath you, a lazy squirm. Her hand found the outer edge of your bare thigh, like it was instinctual.

“Root, wake up.” You snapped your fingers loudly in front of her face, and her closed eyelids crinkled more tightly shut.

You bounced on top of her, shaking her shoulders, finding yourself on the verge of whining. “Do you have to sleep like a fucking rock?"

“Mmm. ‘M sleepin’.”

“Open your eyes for two seconds, for Christ's sake.”

You felt the heavy sigh that escaped Root’s body, the deep heave of her chest, as if she were drawing up the energy to push her eyelids open.

And the second she did open them, of course, you forgot what you were doing.

Eyes wet with disrupted sleep, her pupils sluggishly dilated, Root looked ethereal. And that dug into your chest like bullets.

“Yes?” Root prompted, her voice barely a whisper. She seemed careless to your position on top of her, as if she’s been waiting for this.

For you.

You knew your hot breath lapped at her face, heavy with scotch and uncharted desire, and you wondered if you should be embarrassed. You wondered if she was annoyed. You wondered if you cared. You wondered if, perhaps, you’d learn to seep into Root’s body like a psychological phenomenon and finally grasp what it was about her that enthralled you so disastrously. 

You stared at her lips, feeling your mind dwindle out of itself, dripping out a funnel into nothing. You stared at her lips like that was enough to fix this.

Because something was broken, wasn’t it?

“Sameen?” Her hand was suddenly on your face, her thumb rubbing over your cheekbone, so softly you could imagine it wasn’t there at all. 

You wanted to tell her you were sorry, that you wished you could diagnose these emotions swirling inside of you, that you felt them the way that she did, that you could say these definitively were emotions that you were feeling, that you actually were feeling  _ something _ at all, but the everlasting pit of nothing expanded, seeped throughout like vines.

For someone who never felt anything, it was overwhelming to feel even less than before.

“I don’t get it,” you whispered, finally.

Root rubbed her thumb over your cheek again, her gaze worriedly scanning between your eyes. “Get what, sweetie?” You hated the concern, you wanted to smack it off her face from existence.

_ You _ .

As quickly as you’d climbed on top of her, you now rolled off the couch. Everything was far too tactile and sensory. You had nothing but the weight of the air, the reflective aftertaste of scotch, the wavering scent of a shampoo Root was wearing that wasn’t yours, the quiet of the city prickling your ear drums.

You knew you were stumbling. 

You knew you shouldn’t go anywhere.

But you were out the door and scrambling down the stairs before Root could say a goddamn word.

* * *

 

You didn’t go back for two days. Finch called with a number, and you proceeded to ignore Reese’s calloused eyeballs watching you when you slept in the subway.

They didn’t ask.

You didn’t care.

When you finally went home—

_ Home? _

—the apartment was stark and empty. You were expecting nothing else, but something of its vacancy made your skin crawl, like an astronomical vacuum that shouldn’t exist.

You didn’t let yourself think about how it were as if she had never been there at all.

* * *

 

You probably should go to the subway, find Reese or something, to patch up the bullet hole in your shoulder, but you were  _ tired _ .

Yeah, you needed some attention not so drowsy and lazy as yours was right now, but damn you also needed a beer and a good long sleep. Plus, it was a through-and-through. The wound was nothing. You’d survived hell of a lot worse with only your blurry hands to stop the bleeding.

You tried not to think of her when you dripped blood on the cheap hallway carpet and pushed the door open with your good shoulder. Your primary instinct was a hazy beeline for the fridge, and you cradled your arm tight against your chest. You’d be damned if you let the blood spill on  _ your  _ clean ass floors.

Honestly, you weren’t have trouble opening the beer, you were just tired and distracted, but when Root burst through the door without a care in the world and zipped into your little bubble like an animal hopping on its prey, she caught you wide-eyed and cradling the bottle under your armpit as you tried to pry the cap off with your teeth.

“Are you kidding me, Sameen?” Root growled, and, okay, shit, Root was hot when she was mad. “ _ Give _ me that.” She snatched the beer from your arm and began yanking your jacket off, and you hissed at the abrupt pain. “What is the matter with you? You get shot and it’s time for a drink?”

“Uh—”

Once the jacket was on the floor, Root was grabbing you by the hips and forcing you over to the barstools, shockingly strong with the way she handled you and sat you down. 

“Root—”

“Dammit, Shaw.” She’d pulled a pair of scissors from the medkit she’d gotten, somewhere, and was slicing your shirt down the front, craning her neck down to squint at your wound. “Fuck.” Root disappeared, only for a second to flick on the lights, and then she was back in front of your shirtless self, palming your collarbone to adjust the angle.

You reached for the beer she’d set down on the counter, but Root slapped your hand. 

“I swear, if you treated your patients anything like you do yourself, it’s no wonder you never became a doctor,” Root grumbled.

Anyone else, you’d be twinged with irritation, and you’d likely kick them out right then and there.

But this was… new.

Normally, you were the one scowling at Root’s reckless behavior, shoving her from harm’s way because she was too distracted becoming the second-hand of a god. 

Now, she was dipping a towel into rubbing alcohol and aggressively sticking it to your shoulder,

And, yeah, you were kind of peeved that she stooped that low at your failed career track but—

You weren’t sure when you became the one to always be staring.

.Root was still going on about teamwork and responsibility, something about the bigger picture, but like, her lips were moving. Really fast. And the jaw-clenching sting of her cleanup work on your shoulder wasn’t that totally unpleasant.

Sure, you didn’t understand anything about this woman when it came to her role in your life, but it was getting steadily harder and harder to understand what was stopping you from exploring it.

Root’s voice grew softer. “Look, I get that you're frustrated, angry, and probably a little bit scared, Sam, but we can’t afford careless mistakes.”

You smirked, still staring at Root’s lips. “Oh, please, I’m not scared.”

“Well, maybe you should be.” Root’s hand dropped from your shoulder, and her eyes drove through you like drilled screws, sharp and penetrating. You blinked at the whiplash, meeting those hazardous orbs. “Because you could’ve died back there, or the day before, or maybe tomorrow. So while you may not be scared about what could happen to you the next time, other people are.” While pissed off Root was undeniably turning your guts over and over, this hardened glare was undecipherable. It was pure and steady, yet so desperately chaotic. 

(This was why.)

“People who care for you,” Root muttered, stuffing gauze against your shoulder. “Try to remember that.”

(This was exactly what was stopping you.)

You jerked beneath Root’s touch, shrugging her off of you, and finished taping down the pads on your shoulder. It was a poor angle, and you could practically hear Root’s eyes rolling at your stubbornness, but you didn’t care.

Why did Root have to go and open her big stupid mouth?

“I don’t know what you want from me, Root.” You dared her to stop you this time as you reclaimed your beer.

“I want you to realize that you’re not working alone, Shaw. Part of being a team, part of  _ this—"  _ and here s he waved between you two furiously, her voice climbing octaves to a cracking shout, “—means that you can’t throw yourself at the first note of danger and expect you to be the only one handling the consequences.”

“I didn’t ask for your help,” you shot back heatedly. “Hell, I don’t even know what you’re doing here. I can take care of myself.”

Root was near quaking with her anger, attempting to distract the coiling passion with cleaning up the medkit. “You’re not listening,” she growled. “It’s not fucking about who asked whom; the bottom line is we can’t afford to  _ lose _ you.” Root aggravatedly tossed the scissors into the bag, and it skidded away from her on the counter. Sucking in her bottom lip, she rubbed at her forehead. “ _ I _ can’t lose you.”

Her eyes were closed, and you watched her.

A turmoil of emotions revolting off of her in waves. There was an infinity of words she could say to you, a terrifying spectrum of confessions and questions that would take you places you didn’t know how to get to, much less come back from.

She was thinking too hard, you knew. But then again, so were you.

“Okay.” You finally said. “Anything else?” 

Disappointment may be foreign enough of a concept, but it’d never so articulately displayed itself on Root’s face, directed so defeatedly at you. “‘Okay’? Is that really all you can say?”

“I don’t know what you  _ want  _ me to say, Root.”

It was for her own good. You were doing you both a favor. It was a harsh truth, maybe bended and twisted a bit, but the two of you would never work. Whatever she was implying, whatever she meant, it didn’t matter. 

You didn’t have the capacity to give her what she needed.

“Honestly, Sameen,” Root said quietly, her voice calmer now. “I don’t know either.”

She hovered for a moment, on the other side of the counter still, staring down at a nonexistent space, so lost in her own thoughts. You wondered if she was going to start yelling again.

When she turned around and left without a word, you didn’t move.

The night continued on by without her, the city kept functioning like well-oiled gears. Life went on.

There was only so much you could give. You had to draw the line somewhere, before it went too far, before she realized how cruel and careless you really were. Root was so hopeful, she believed so much in the depth and complexity of your mind. She had so much raw, bleeding  _ faith _ that you cared, that you felt, that you weren’t broken.

It didn’t matter whether she was right or not.

Whatever the answer was, you knew it’d never be enough for her, that it could never measure up to the way she felt and unequivocally  _ loved _ .

And you refused to be the one to break a god.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> nothing boosts me to update like a nice comment :)


	4. fight fear for the selfish pain (it was worth it every time)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i apologize this took longer than the last updates, but it is almost twice as long, so there's that.

A week passed, and you realized it had been a week since Root bugged you for a favor.

You were zip-typing a dumbass wannabe-gang-thug to a police cruiser’s door, when the thought glanced up at you like a shadow.

You shrugged it off.

You’d gone longer without seeing her.

* * *

 

After two weeks, you were in the subway scratching Bear’s ears, and Finch was filling you in on a number, when you realized it had been two weeks.

Bear rubbed his wet nose against your palm.

He whined a little, like your thoughts trickled out your ears and mingled with his. His eyes were wide and brown, and you looked back at him.

It’s gone longer, before.

* * *

 

Three weeks later, you stared at the clock above the stove with a beer in your hand.

At 12:01, you started staring at the front door.

At 12:10, you poked your head down the fire escape. Your beer was half empty.

At 12:59 you padded to your room with a bottle of whiskey.

* * *

 

Four weeks passed, and you dreamt of a clumsy hacker straddling your hips and sucking on your neck.

You dreamt of your hands in her hair, tugging, pulling, _needy_.

You dreamt of the weight of her waist in your sturdy palms, of the heat of her breath against your mouth, of her wicked smile like scalding frostbite.

When she started licking your face, you jolted awake in the subway to find Bear squatting on top of you, watching you curiously.

You called him off of you, and rubbed at your eyes. It was 11:30 at night, and you found yourself doing something that might resemble rushing out of the subway back to your apartment.

(You’d deny it.)

You got there by 12:07.

It was as empty as it always was.

You didn’t think you’d gone longer, anymore.

* * *

 

Over a month had run by. You lost count of the numbers, of the hours at Bloomingdales. The timetables were getting blurry. It had nothing to do with _her_. It’s not like you were tilted offset with a worry that chilled like snowflakes at the back of your neck, or that she even owed you some resemblance of an explanation, some assurance that she was alive. There was no agreement set in place.

You were just laying low. Like you were supposed to. And Root probably was too.

You didn’t care.

It was seven in the morning when someone knocked at your door.

It was vaguely similar to that triple-staccato, but disjointed, and a quick glance at the clock didn’t let your mind entertain that idea. You frowned. Reese and Finch weren’t moronic enough to swing by your cover’s place, definitely not without a call or text in warning.

Even after a look through the peephole, you kept the barrel of your USP tight against the door as you opened it, slowly, cautiously.

“Where is she?” Jason grunted, scowling, and looking as if he were debating whether to push past you and search the apartment himself.

“Who?” you asked.

He sighed and rubbed at his stubble. “Root. Where. Is. She?”

Your face felt like stale clay.

“I don’t know.”

Jason clenched his fists at his sides, shooting impatient glances down both ends of the hallway. “We don’t have time for this, Shaw. We need the component registration updated by tonight, or the install’s never gonna be validated. So tell your girlfriend to quit playing house and bring her module. Preferably before midnight, for once.”

You stared emptily at him, and you weren’t sure when your blood grew so cold.

“Root’s not here.”

Jason looked ready to pick a fight, and to be honest you’d be down for an excuse to lash at someone’s throat, especially with the way your muscles were coiling around your spine like they were full of needles. “Then where did she go?”

“I don’t know,” you repeated, scowling at his attitude. “I haven’t seen Root since last month.”.

A confusion apparated in Jason’s eyes like a lazy poison. His eyebrows dug into a frown, and he shook his head. “She said she was taking some time off a few weeks ago. Personal stuff. We assumed… she _implied_ that she’s been staying with you. She said you two have been working numbers, together.”

You gritted your teeth, lips tightly sealed, and shook your head with a jagged shrug. “Well, she’s not here. I haven’t done a job with Root since the gala at the Botanical.”

Jason looked stupidly constipated. This was all so much more awkward than it needed to be. “The gala? You mean, the DNA dude? That was hardly a job, why’d she need you? And why did you go to a gala.”

You frowned, slightly caught off. “I don’t know. She said the feds were looking for a solo worker, and needed my to help her blend in.”

Jason snorted. “Yeah, right. That shit was way above the federal heads.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Did she not tell you what you were even doing?”

“I—” You bit your tongue. Yeah, you’d asked, but Root had waved you off like she hadn’t even known what she was doing. You figured… honestly, you didn’t know what you’d thought. You just went with it.

“It was just some dude that was gonna sell some code to Samaritan that would give them international access to feeds around the world by incorporating, like, the same kind of analysis they use at the garden to better understand plants and species, but to a network system, like Samaritan. All Root did was plant a bug to make the code ruin itself, you know, like cancer, make it look like bad code. I don’t know why she took you to that gala. She said she was gonna impersonate an over-zealous intern to get in there. Would’ve been in and out in less than an hour.”

God, Root would be that _stupid_ as to use a mission for the Machine as an excuse to go on a date with you. She never needed you, and that’s why she kept spoon-feeding you champagne like candy.

She wanted you to have fun.

She wanted you.

In an albeit creepy, stalker-ish, manipulative type way.

It was so ridiculously moronic, so canny and contriving, and just so _Root_.

Fuming internally, you clenched your hands at your sides.

“Whatever, it doesn’t matter now, can just call her? Find out where she is?”

“Me?” you snapped incredulously. “You do it.”

“She doesn’t answer. Besides, you’re the girlfriend, shouldn’t you care that she’s just disappeared?”

Your patience snapped, and your fist shot out to the man’s collar, tugging him into the apartment and holding his face inches from yours. “She is _not_ my—” you hissed, but restrained yourself. You sighed, closing your eyes as your fingers let go of his shirt just as quickly as you’d grabbed him. An urge to keep your irritation under wraps suppressed you. “We’re not anything.”

Jason shrugged out of your direct vicinity and eyed you wearily. “Look, I don’t care what you two are, really, you do you. But we need that module by tonight.”

You sighed again, shaking your head and walked deeper back into your apartment. “So call Harold, I don’t know what you want me to do. Root’s probably on some wild goose chase the Machine sent her on. It would probably do you and the other nerds some good to work on that weird dependency you all have on her.”

“She’s not on another mission. _This_ is the mission.”

You rolled your eyes again. “I don’t know, Jason. I’m tired, I haven’t slept in forty-eight hours, so go bother someone who cares.”

Jason stared at you, tilting his head with an odd frown. “Are you serious?”

Over your bottle, you raised an eyebrow. “What? Of course I’m serious. I need my beauty sleep.”

There was that _look_ again, so similar to the one Root had worn the last time you saw her, that distasteful disappointment that made your tongue feel like it was rotting.

Jason’s eyes were wide and so mundanely sad. And then he was opening his mouth, and he was telling you, “For the life of me, I can’t understand why she believes in you so much.”

That nailed into your gut like a .45, like a rifle, like brass knuckles, like suffocating.

You stared at Jason.

(You wondered why, distantly, people continued to talk to you as if they expected something from you, when you barely knew how to process what they were saying in the first place.)

“It just… it kind of sucks, watching someone as brilliant and incredible as Root just… waste herself, on someone who couldn’t give less of a damn about her.”

You blinked, drank your beer.

“You can’t even see it, can you? That woman would fucking do anything for you. You realize you’re not gonna find anyone else like that, right? She’s the only one that thinks there’s still hope for you. That you’re not a waste of time.”

Your face kept still like a clean slate, devoid of reaction. You took another sip of the drink, entirely ignoring his words, but continuing to meet his offensive gaze. He was waiting, for something, but again, you weren’t sure what.

“I just wonder who’s gonna be the one to break it to her.”

Your knuckles were growing white around the beer bottle, your jaw beginning to ache with the tension. You wanted to hurl the glass at his skull, to smash that arrogant superiority off his stupid face. Really, you wanted to tug the gun out from the freezer and stuff a bullet in his head.

But you remained calm.

“Get out, Jason,” you muttered, taking a swig of your drink, before you turned back down the hallway and towards your room.

You shut the door and sat on your bed, setting the beer down on the night stand.

When you heard the front door out in the apartment click shut, signalling Jason’s exit, you picked up the phone.

* * *

 

“Hi, sweetie.”

“Root? How did you know it was me?”

“What makes you think you’re my only sweetie?”

“...Root. Where are you?”

“What’s the matter, Sameen? You miss me?”

“No... but a friend of yours had the balls to stop by my place, asking questions. Did you tell the geek squad that we’re dating or something?”

“That was Her doing, actually. She thinks we’re cute together.”

“I— What? No, nevermind. Not the point. Seriously, where are you?”

“You-know-who might be listening. My lips are sealed.”

“Shut up, it’s satelite, you know this line is secure.”

“Freeport, right now.”

“You’re in Maine?”

“No, the Bahamas. I just came from Buenos Aires though, but the cocktails here are still absolutely to die for. You should try one sometime.”

“What the hell are you doing in a bunch of resorts?”

“Killing two birds with one stone. Machine’s letting me take a vacation so long as I keep up with work on the way.”

“Okay, but _why_ are you on vacation?”

Root paused, and you waited.

And waited.

You were ready to ask again, check if the line was still running, when she answered.

“I needed it.”

You sat forward on your bed, elbows on your knees, and rubbed at your forehead. Words clogged in your throat, and despite your inability to ever hate Root, as much as you wanted to, you found you _did_ hate this. This speechlessness, your clumsy mouth, around her.

“Are you… okay?” you finally asked, staring at a scratch on your floor.

Root chuckled quietly in the phone, and you wondered who was paying for the cellular data to call out of the islands. “Yeah, Sameen, I’m okay. I always am.”

You thought about the look on her face, the _“is that really all you can say?”_ and the _“Honestly Sameen? I don’t know either._ ”

You thought about Jason, you thought about coworkers in the ISA, about paramedics on the scene of an automobile accident. You thought about the “ _What’s the matter with you?”_ ’s, the way they all looked at you. Like you were busted, like you were lacking something essential, like they were disappointed in your very being. Like how your chief resident looked at you and said you just weren’t made to be good enough.

You thought about Root.

You thought about how Root would look at you.

Not like you were the obstacle, or that the way you existed was the problem, or that you were her next project to fix up.

But rather, you were the solution, and she was disappointed simply that you couldn’t see it.

“You know, it’d be okay if you weren’t,” you said.

You thought that you could hear her smile through the static. She was quiet for a long time, just the buzz of the line, until finally she said, “I know. Thank you.”

Clearing your throat, you sat up a little straighter. “So, could you come back, and tell your guard dogs to leave me alone? They’re losing their heads about some module.”

Root laughed, and maybe it sparked the corner of your mouth to perk up. “Honestly, that module is the simplest bit of code I have ever written. I’m a little embarrassed they need my help with it in the first place.”

“I don’t know why you’re surprised,” you said. “They’re high school geeks on adderall at best.”

“That’s valid.”

The conversation muted again, dropping back into the steady static. You picked at a loose seam on your boxers.

“Just… come back, Root.”

There was a lot more you could say. Logistically speaking.

Something like _home_.

But you left it at that.

“Okay, Sameen.”

* * *

 

Two days later, someone knocked at your door.

You looked at the clock above the stove. 11:59pm.

You smiled.

* * *

 

Of course, by the time you’d opened the door, your smile was stifled to something more mellow and cool.

The first thing you noticed was the blood dripping onto the carpet, and you were just about ready to start scolding Root for the blood stains it would leave _again_ , and _that_ conversation you were gonna have with your landlord, when you realized—

It was hers this time.

Streaming out of a soggy, dirty rag tied haphazardly around her thigh.

“Hey sweetie,” Root breathed, her trademark smile tired and forced across her pale, tight skin. “Long time no see.”

She was slumped against the doorway, barely able to support herself standing, and you instinctively grabbed her by the waist, urging her arm about your shoulders, and she groaned quietly. “The fuck, Root? You were sipping piña coladas on the beach barely forty-eight hours ago,” you grumbled, dragging the woman across the threshold to the couch.

“What can I say,” Root panted, still grinning as she sluggishly scrabbled to keep upright against you. “I like to keep busy.”

Gingerly, you laid her down on the cushions, hasty to prop a pillow under her foot and another behind her head, and it was then that you noticed her face. Busted lip, cheekbones splashed with splays of red and purple forming new bruises, dirty scrapes along her jaw and nose.

“Root, what the fuck,” you repeated, taking in the rest of her. You opened the flaps of her leather jacket, lifting her shirt to examine any abdominal or rib damage. Again, just more scrapes and bruises, splatters of colors across her fair skin.

This was usually the part where Root explained whatever dumb ass plan the Machine had hashed her out on, how it backfired and how she got fucked over in the process. After running to your bedroom for your med kit and unwrapping the shitty cloth around her thigh to reveal an angry, spouting puncture, at least two inches long, you shot a furtive look up to Root in waiting.

But she was staring at the ceiling, fists clenched meekly at the couch, gaze unwavering.

 _Whatever_.

You worked to stop the bleeding furiously, and you worried it had nicked her artery for how heavy and persistent the flow was. It was hard to tell, with how little vision you had. Hit or miss — literally. You tore through packs and packs of gauze, gathering a white bloody mess on your living room floor, and Root looked ready to pass out, her breathing shallow, eyelids twitching. But still, you couldn’t get the flow to stop pooling out in thick bursts, dark against your couch and soaking into the fabric.

“ _Fuck_ ,” you growled, wiping the thinnest line of sweat from your brow and only smearing Root’s blood across your forehead. Quickly, in an instant, you assessed situation.

Stab puncture to the thigh—

Weapon unknown, maybe an Army Swiss blade—

With how weak the geyser-like spurts of blood were whenever you pulled your hand away, the knife likely missed the femoral but rather hit a branch of the artery—

Root’s skin was dropping dangerously, cold and clammy, sickening to the touch—

She was obviously going into shock, with her shaky, dilated pupils, gasping breaths like a fish out of water, that insatiable shivering—

Even with your palms splayed over the wound, blood still oozed from between your fingertips—

She would die here.

You lurched back to your feet and scrambled off to the bathroom for a large towel, sliding across linoleum in your haste. She was losing too much blood, and your own was running cold. Maybe you could stop the bleeding, but the base line was it would still be too much.

When you returned, you covered her leg in the remainder of your gauze stock and coated Root’s thigh in the bath towel, tying it tightly, before unlooping your belt and securing that about the towel.

“Okay, come on,” you said, scooping Root back up, bridal-style. “Up we go.”

“Your optimism is astoundingly encouraging,” Root gasped, face collapsing against your chest.

“Always happy to be of service,” you grunted right back, kicking your way out the apartment and scraping at the elevator call button.

By the time you made it to the car, Root in the backseat with her thigh lifted up over the center console, you were dialing Finch on the phone as you lurched out into midnight traffic. You tapped him on speaker.

Finch answered quickly, but grumpily. “Ms. Shaw, I believe we have an understanding about these late-night calls during our off-duty time—”

“It’s Root,” you blurted, weaving through honking cars and angry pedestrians. “She got stabbed, or something.” Your eyes darted to the rearview mirror, which you adjusted for a better look to take in Root’s sickly pale face, the sweat dribbling down the sides of her face. “It’s bad. I’m coming to you. Have some O-neg ready.”

“If Ms. Groves is that badly injured, perhaps a hospital might—”

“ _No,_ ” Root gasped from the backseat, and you heard her pained grunt as she tried to sit up.

“Lay back down,” you snapped over your shoulder, reaching over to point your gun at her. “Or I swear to God I’ll shoot you.”

“That seems a bit counterproductive,” Finch piped in dryly.

“No hospitals,” Root groaned. “Machine hasn’t given me a new identity, and this one’s running out.”

“What does that even mean,” you grumbled, running a red-light. You cleared your throat. “Just be ready for us. We’ll be there in five.”

“It’s a twenty-minute drive with traffic at this time of—”

“ _Five_.” You cut off the call irritably.

“Gotta say, Shaw,” Root said, her voice still weaker than ever, slurring. “This manic driving is kind of sexy.”

“Shut up.”

* * *

 

“ _Finch_ ,” you called out six minutes later, shouldering your way into the subway with Root in your arms.

“Yes, yes! This way.” He hobbled over to the pair of you, ushering you to a cot in the corner. Finch was fumbling with the tubing and hanging up the blood bags as you laid Root down softly, gently.

The woman smiled lazily up at you, her eyes drooping closed and fluttering, but you jostled her shoulders. “Hey, c’mon, stay awake,” you said, brushing hair from her face. “For me,” you added softly, like an afterthought you didn’t recognize.

Root blinked her eyes open, and that dopey smile stretched.

Finch stepped aside and pulled up some more packaging of gauze. The towel had soaked up a dangerous amount of blood, but it seemed as if the flow had stopped for now. You go to work setting up the IV, wiping the inner crook of Root’s elbow with disinfectant, and undoing your belt at her leg to wrap instead around her bicep.

“It was about a class two hemorrhage when we left,” you told him stiffly as you worked. “We’re looking at a class three, now.”

“Here I always thought I was ten out of ten,” Root mumbled, her eyes fluttering closed.

“May I remind you that there is a hospital less than a mile away from here,” Harold muttered to you, watching over your shoulder as you sunk the needle into Root’s arm.

“Nuh,” Root mumbled at the same time that you snapped, “We’re not there yet.”

Softening just the slightest, you met Harold’s eyes. “If it gets to class four, we’ll go,” you breathed, quietly enough for Root to not hear you.

Instinctively, you knew she’d be fine. She always was.

And once the blood started flowing through the rubber tubes, you breathed a little easier.

But that didn’t change the crippling chill down your back like an icy sweat.

Now with the transfusion going, you set to unwrapping Root’s thigh and cleaning it with a bucket of soap and water Harold had dragged over.

“Are you going to tell me what happened?” you asked, some time later, when color was appearing a little more in Root’s clammy skin, and you were finishing up your clean, precise sutures.

“You should see the other guy,” was all Root gave up, shivering again, her teeth chattering.

Gritting your teeth, you slathered on an antibiotic cream, wrapping it finally in more bandaging, and replaced the blood bag.

You stole Finch’s coat off a chair and draped it over Root’s body, tucking her into it, and left her alone on the cot. After cleaning up the bloody towel and other messy wrappings, you made your way up to Finch at his computer.

“How is she doing?”

“Fine. Still don’t know what happened, but she’ll live.”

Finch nodded, regarding you carefully. “The Machine does have a tendency to send Root on solitary missions,” he said.

You rolled your eyes, irritated that Finch knew your thinking so well. “Doesn’t mean she’s invincible. For a supposed super intelligence, your Machine is kind of a dumbass.”

He didn’t appear phased or affronted, rather empathetic of your anger. “Ms. Groves believes the Machine has her best interests at heart. Well, metaphorically speaking.”

You cocked your jaw. “And you? Do you believe that?”

“I think…” Harold began, his mouth parted open in hesitance at his coming words. “I think that the Machine, in our current state of hiding, can only protect us so much, regardless of what it wants, for lack of a better word. Yet, concurrently, there _is_ work to be done, work that only Root can do. There’s always a factor of risk, Ms. Shaw. I believe you understand that better than most.”

You crossed your arms, scowling down at him. “There’s a difference between risk and outright stupidity.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

You glanced away, the look he was giving you growing far too mundane and emotional. You found yourself watching the deliberate rise and fall of Root’s chest across the room, who seemingly had passed out, finally. Harold’s own sight trailed along yours, and he spoke again.

“I found myself having a similar conversation, not too long ago, with Ms. Groves.”

“Did you, now?” you panned.

“While you believe the Machine is too careless of Root’s physical limits,” he began. “Ms. Groves worries you have too little regards for your own self.”

You chuckled heartlessly, but said nothing.

“Everyone wants something from you, don’t they?” Finch asked softly. “A particular response, a  calculated reaction. Despite their knowledge of your core being, they still expect a level of attempt on your part to… fit in.”

You looked at him, wondering where he was going, what _he_ was fishing for out of you.

“It seems all Ms. Groves has ever wanted was for you to care about yourself.”

You looked at him, your eyes hard and unforgiving, your jaw aching.

“Give her one more pint of blood, and she’ll be fine. There’s tylenol in the bag.”

And then you were pushing yourself off from the desk, grabbing your coat, and storming out of the subway.

* * *

 

 

The next day, Reese texted you in the early afternoon to meet at the subway about a new number.

There goes your avoid-Root-like-the-plague plan.

At least it was an excuse to leave your shift at the makeup counter, flimsy lies of a family emergency as you swept out the door. You couldn’t wait to be fired.

When you stepped through the vending machine and onto the subway platform, however, the cot you had left Root at was empty, and you frowned.

“Where’s Root?”

Finch turned in his chair to look at you. “Oh, she left. The Machine sent a coded program with her newest identity. You just missed her.”

“She _left_?”

Finch and Reese looked at each other with something akin to anxiety.

“She has a new mission,” John offered lamely.

“New mission my _ass_ ,” you growled, already turning back around and running back into the street, your phone out in hand, dialing.

“Hi swee—”

“Where the fuck are you?”

“Kiss kiss to you too.”

“Not now, Root, I swear to God.” You stormed down the sidewalk, your boots slapping against the slippery pavement, and you scanned the immediate area for any sign of that _stupid_ hacker. “Where the hell are you?”

“About to catch a cab,” she replied airily as you rounded the corner and saw her doing just that, standing in the street with a hand raised up and out, her back to you. “There’s still work to be done here in New York, especially after my leave of absence.”

Your lips twisted in a snarl. You smacked the End Call, and pounded across the street to her. “Root,” you hissed, and aggressively clasped onto her arm, tugging her towards you.

It was harsh, especially considering the pathetic way she stumbled off balance with her poor leg, and you didn’t miss the flash of pain across her already beaten-up face.

“Actually,” Root gritted, hopping back to proper standing. “It’s Angelica. I have a board meeting to get to with a local high school.”

“Forget it,” you spat, pulling her back off proper footing and dragging her towards the subway. “What’s the matter with you? And that _stupid_ Machine? You were just fucking stabbed, you’re not going anywhere. Besides, who goes to a school board meeting looking like they were just mugged?”

Root struggled to keep up with your unforgiving pace, and she was breathless as she spoke. “The concern is adorable, Sameen, but—”

You halted, suddenly, Root stumbling into you clumsily, and hissing in pain again.

“You don’t get to fucking tell me to be careful and work as a team and consider other consequences, and then just _pull_ shit like this,” you snapped. “Fine, I’m a reckless ass, and fine, I should realize I’m not working alone anymore. But that means _you_ need to see you’re not alone either.” You dropped her arm out of your steel clutch to run a hand through your hair, trying to control your angered, labored breath. “The Machine, it’s not—” You swallowed. “I know it’s an all-seeing god, and I know it’s… given you this purpose that you’ve never known before, or whatever. But sometimes you need to put yourself first.”

Root stared at you, a soft frown rounding her features.

“Because— some of us care about you, okay? Whether I like it or not, we need _you_ , not just what you can do, not just an Analog Interface.”

It was funny, how the situations were reversed, yet the same. Root struggled to explain to you that putting yourself first wasn’t enough, that just because you were content enough with a certain low standard of your health (really, so long as you were alive, there’s nothing to complain about), it didn’t mean the rest of the team was as indifferent as you; yet, here you were, pounding something similar into Root. But her issue was that she cared too _much_ about everyone else, about the missions, about the Machine, about making sure everyone else was safe first, before herself. She cared about herself, yes, but the second someone needed something of her, she was all too willing to walk through fire for them, be it the Machine or whoever. While on one hand, you cared about yourself to an extent, you also never stopped to think about how others might care beyond your own limits. You both were hypocrites preaching on opposite sides of the same argument.

You met her eyes, and your throat tightened, like tension, like resistance. Her heavy stare didn’t make you think of hurricanes, of natural disasters or implosions of passion. It wasn’t a helpless rage or blood stains of art.

Her stare was quiet.

(Her stare didn’t destroy you in its siege.)

(It calmed you.)

“I need you,” you said.

Root’s wide eyes softened marginally.

And her lips smiled.

“So,” you went on, clearing your throat before she could say something annoying. “Get your ass back to the subway and rest that damn leg.”

Her ethereal smile morphed into something like a smirk, and Root stepped clumsily towards you, linking your arms. “Doctors orders,” she said, and, as you walked her back to the subway, you had a feeling she wasn’t addressing you.

* * *

 

Back at the subway, John and Finch eyed the pair of you wearily. It was fair, considering Root’s stupid, brilliant smile and how gleefully she limped back to the cot and how heartily she accepted her sentence of bed rest.

She was all too thrilled to peel off her loose jeans for you to change the dressings and check up on your handiwork.You were just thankul Root thought it too obvious a situation for an innuendo, letting the silence between you two speak for itself.

You thought you saw Finch staring at the ceiling in prayer for an end.

Yeah, maybe you were smirking a little too.

* * *

 

That afternoon had you posing as a new intern at Witherton to watch your number, some awkwardly boring insurance worker. Once he’d left the office, Finch hastily (and vaguely) called you back to the subway. With his promise of a job for you elsewhere, you only hoped it involved guns.

Entering the subway, Root wasn’t immediately visible, and Harold captured your attention first with his rambling complaints of a conference he had to intend in Hong Kong, explaining his need for you to handle any technological issues that the latest number presented.

You listened distractedly, scanning the rest of the subway for that annoying wave of hair, that infuriating smirk.

When she emerged from the subway car on a pathetic, makeshift pair of crutches crafted from some old planks, you raised an eyebrow.

She caught your look over Finch’s shoulder.

Finch was saying… something. About John. And communication. Teamwork, maybe. Honestly, you weren’t that sure.

Root smiled at you, that soft, hushed upturn of her mouth.

You understood everything about Root that was stopping you; her roaring desires, her buried frenzy of emotions and bias, that detrimental worry and concern that would probably get her killed one day.

You knew exactly what was stopping you.

But you weren’t sure any of it was relevant, anymore.

(About three minutes into the conversation, Finch had finally realized he’d lost your attention to something over his shoulder, gave up, and rushed off to make his 16-hour flight.)

* * *

 

The next day, you met up with John and Lionel to check out some military-grade weapon that John had found while dealing with the latest number, and you’d been sent back to nerd duty to look into some phone calls the number had been getting.

Maybe you picked up some pizza on the way.

(You ordered extra mushrooms, though.)

Root was painting her nails beside Harold’s computer, every now and again reaching for his keyboard to tap out a blurry sequence, and then resuming her artwork.

“Hey,” you said.

Root looked up at you, and her smile was infuriatingly luminous. “Hi, honey. How was work?” she drawled playfully.

You raised an eyebrow and sunk into Finch’s desk chair, popping open the box of pizza and fishing out a slice. “I thought I made it clear that you’d make a horrible housewife.”

Root shrugged. “A girl can still dream.”

“And what dreams are those?” you asked, before you could think better of it.

Her following shit-eating grin stirred you almost uncomfortably, and again, Root shrugged, though it was more languid and vague. “You know, the usual. The white-picket fence, the dog, the multi-million dollar armory. And the earth-shattering sex. Obviously. What do you dream about?”

You decided against mentioning the dreams you’d had in the midst of Root disappearance, and instead distracted her with an offering of pizza.

Wrinkling her nose, she pouted. “There’s mushrooms.”

“How much do you think I like you, exactly?”

Root’s grin immediately resurfaced. “So you like me?”

You scowled, and stuffed the pizza into your mouth. When Root patiently cocked her head, decidedly waiting for your answer, you huffed. “I’m not answering that.” You shooed her away from Harold’s keyboard and got to combing through the number’s call history.

“Why not?”

“‘Cause, it’s a stupid question.”

“Because it’s true?”

“Because it’s _stupid_.”

Root grinned, and you wondered why the hell you actively, willingly shared your pizza with someone so annoying.

* * *

 

Some time passed, mostly in content quiet while Root put together some work for the Machine and her nerd squad on her own laptop, you occasionally relaying to John your findings on the phone, the clock ticking by sluggishly.

“You know how long Harold’s in Hong Kong for?” you asked after tapping out of a conversation with Reese. You were seriously tired of this electronic crap. You partly wished the Machine would let Root out of her own work, so she could take over the technical part of this number, but at the same time… well, maybe you weren’t exactly complaining about being stuck in the subway with Root. At least the Machine had acquiesced to Root’s situation of house-arrest. Perhaps it considered you a greater threat, should Root try and leave again.

“Why? Am I boring you?”

“No, I just—”

Root smirked. “You just what?”

You inhaled deeply, and looked away, fiddling with the discarded pizza crusts. Bear perked up at your fidgeting, and you tossed him a scrap.

“Nothing. I was just wondering.”

Root pursed her lips bemusedly and went back to work.

* * *

 

“Can I stay at your place tonight?”

You looked up from the computer after sending Lionel some GPS coordinates of the stolen cell phone.

“What?”

“Your apartment. Is it okay if I stay there tonight?”

You didn’t exactly understand why she was asking, now, when she never did before. There’d never _been_ a question. You’d never had the option, a say in the matter.

“Yeah,” you answered, eyes narrowed. “Of course,” you tacked on, as a second thought.

Root smiled in thanks, though it was with that softness again, that stilted contentment that set everything you understood about feelings and mundane emotions off by the faintest of degrees. It was absurdly calming, for something so foreign to your system.

“The subway can get a bit confining, as I’m sure you’re well aware. I’d rather somewhere more…”

 _Homey_ , you imagined she might’ve said.

Root shrugged. “You know what I mean.”

Yeah, you did.

With Harold’s funds stiff and finite, no longer limitless billions, he was strict about transportation expenses, and you took the subway more often than cabs, or one of Finch’s vehicles themselves. Once he’d come back that night and shooed you away from his computer, in a state of horror at the pizza boxes that littered his desk around it, you and Root left for the metro.

You blamed the bumping sway of the train car barreling through the tunnels for how close you stood to Root, for why you fisted her waist to keep her steady and standing on her leg, for why your thumb was hooked through her belt loops, and why Root’s breathing breezed the tendrils of hair lining your face.

A couple seats opened up throughout the ride but neither of you seemed to take notice.

* * *

 

“What happened to your couch?”

Shutting the door behind you, you followed Root’s line of sight to your bare living room. “Oh, yeah, I had to get rid of it. You owe me a new couch.”

“I do?”

“You got your stupid blood all over it. It was gross.”

“And here I thought you liked it rough. Who knew you were such a baby.”

You rolled your eyes. “What gave you that impression?”

Root tilted her head with a playful smirk. “Something about a hood, zip ties, and ten hours to kill in a CIA safe house, but I suppose that was up for interpretation.”

You grit your teeth, but were unable to suppress the smirk at the memory of that night, and you stalked to the kitchen to shield your smile from Root.

“How’re you feeling?” you called to her as you leant into the fridge. “I do have some stuff stronger than tylenol, if you’re still in pain.”

You were pretty stocked up on the alcohol department, and it had absolutely nothing to do with Root being gone for a month that your liquor bills went up. But as you rummaged through your fridge, you pursed your lip, and decided on two waters.

“Careful, Shaw, or it might seem like you care,” Root teased, and you rolled your eyes at the obnoxiously recurring joke, handling her a bottle of water.

“Or, maybe even that you _need_ me,” she went on, and your scowl breached lethal.

“I’m going to murder you in your sleep,” you gritted.

“Oh, but you’d miss me too much.” Root grinned, taking a sip from her water.

“I’ll take my chances.” God, you should’ve known any resemblance of honesty with Root would only come back to bite you in the ass.

“Speaking of sleep, does this mean we get to cuddle tonight?”

“You can have the fire escape,” you growled.

Root pouted, and you despised the tug in your gut.

After a moment, you sighed, though really it was just another dramatic growl of frustration. “ _Fine_ . But we are _not_ cuddling.”

“Where’s the fun in that?”

* * *

 

At something around midnight (you weren’t keeping track, honest), you turned over onto your side, facing Root.

“Hey, you awake?”

“Yeah,” Root whispered, eyes blinking open to take in yours through the dark. “I’m right here.”

It all reminded you of a night with too much scotch, of a night that you fled, a night that had you all too acutely aware of the steady, particular beat in your chest.

“I don’t get it,” you whispered back, quietly like you weren’t ready to say it out loud again.

“Get what, sweetie?” Root asked.

You regarded her, softly. She was so quiet, so still, so faint in this dark light. It was almost undecipherable, to your structured mind. You thought about the fact that you were likely to die tomorrow, that your cover might be blown any second. You thought about how close that blade was to slicing straight through Root’s femoral, how hopeless it would have been then, how little even your first-rate skills could’ve done. Just a bad situation with inevitable results.

You weren’t stupid. You didn’t believe in destiny, or fate, or the rest of that crap.

It was just calculated probability that one of you was gonna bite it, sooner rather than later. A realistic assessment of the odds simply meant that one of you would die, before you really had a chance to fuck this up first.

It was oddly comforting.

You’d probably be in a body bag before Root realized you didn’t have much else to give her other than sex and a bad attitude.

Or she would get herself killed before you had the chance to tell her yourself.

You were thinking too much, you knew. An entirely selfish, methodical train of thought to put some ease at your self-centered desires for the woman beside you.

Sure, maybe if your lives were normal, and there wasn’t a ticking time bomb strapped to the both of you, then honest to God, you would surely rip her apart. That much you knew. If only given the time, your apathetic distance would wreck Root in an unnerving, psychological decay.

But the bottom line was that neither of you had the life you wanted. And maybe this was a universe of bad luck and poor decisions, and so, just maybe, you were allowed to be selfish. The rest of this world sucked. You deserved something, didn’t you? Having made it this far? When, for all you knew, Martine would show her stupid ass face at Bloomingdale's and drive you straight into hiding tomorrow?

“You,” you finally said. “I don’t get you.”

Root was quiet, to that. Her eyebrows furrowed slightly, as she took you in. And then, she pursed her lips. “I don’t know where you got that idea. I thought I made it clear you can have me all you want.”

You clapped at her shoulder, and she swung away, laughing, before rolling right back to you.

“Sorry,” she giggled.

“No you’re not.”

“You’re right.”

You watched her. The twinkling eyes, the rich, human serenity. How compatible, it seemed, for Root, someone who felt too much, to be so endeared by you, someone who felt too little.

Compatible. Unfitting. Appropriate. Unsuitable.

Depends how you look at it.

“Well,” Root went on, when it was clear you would say nothing more. “I’m an open book. What don’t you get?”

You pressed your lips together. “You piss me off more than anyone,” you said.

Root shrugged. “You can’t feel love, debatably. So if you’re gonna have a passion, it’s gonna be hatred. Makes sense.”

“I don’t hate you,” you quickly assured, again.

Root smiled. “That’s sweet.”

“But I don’t love you.”

Her expression didn’t change, she only tilted her head slightly, curiously. “But why is that?”

You frowned. “You know why.”

“No, I mean, what makes you think that? Diagnosis aside.”

You searched her mien for a trick, for a gaming plot, but found none. “I don’t know. Love is… it’s a strong emotion of affection. That rush of dopamine in the beginning, then later it’s the serotonin. I don’t get that.”

“So what do you get? When you’re not absolutely enraged, of course.”

You glanced down at her mouth. “It’s quiet. Calm. Love is supposed to be loud, isn’t it? People say it consumes you, that it’s insane, a rollercoaster.”

Root shuffled a little closer to you, your legs just barely brushing beneath the sheets.

“I look at you, and… I feel nothing. But, it’s a nothing that wasn’t there, before. You make me feel even less. And that’s what I don’t get.”

Root placed her hand between you two, resting against the mattress, and she rubbed the fabric of the sheets between her thumb and forefinger, thoughtfully. “Who says love isn’t subjective?”

You looked away from her hands, and up at her face.

“Why does love have to be this one thing? Humans are already so different, amongst themselves. Identical twins, even with so much replicating DNA, they’re still unfathomably different people. Why can’t love be the same? Different fits for different people.”

You shrugged. “I dunno.”

Here, Root smirked. “If I make you feel something that you didn’t before, who’s to say that it isn’t love?”

“Me. I say.”

Root shrugged. “Sure. If you want. I’m not asking you to call anything by anything that it’s not. My point is that it’s your life. Screw everyone else. You can be whatever you want to be, feel whatever it is that you feel and call it cotton candy, for all it’s worth. Who else is going to tell you differently?”

“Anyone, basically,” you said flatly.

“Right, but do you care what they say?”

You paused. “No.”

“Exactly,” Root whispered, smiling in the reflective moonlight. “I’m not asking you to feel anything that you don’t, or to pretend something nonexistent is there. I'm not asking you to love me, if you think that you can't.”

“What are you asking for, then?”

Root’s smile morphed to something more wicked. “You claim you don’t care about what anyone else wants from you. So prove it.”

You raised an eyebrow.

“What do you want, Sameen?”

There was a moment of quiet, another stretch of silence to bask in.

When you surged forward, when you caught Root’s lips between yours, like a promise, like a deal, like an agreement that might not last, and your hands scraped behind her neck to tug her closer to you, yeah, maybe you were smiling.

Root laughed, a breathless gasp of air, and she eagerly rolled the two of you over until she sat on top, her burning hips pinning your own to the mattress. “You know,” she panted against your lips, her hands excitedly working under your top and fisting at your bare hips. “I was really hoping this was what you wanted.”

“Root?” you grunted, wrapping your legs around her back, and squeezing her hurt thigh to urge another gasp from her throat. You detached your lips for the barest of moments, pulling away to look up at her, your hand resting against her cheek.

“Yes, sweetie?” Yeah, that aroused smile was damn celestial. Maybe your feelings weren't an explosion, but that smile damn well looked like something similar.

“Shut _up_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is one of the first works i've "finished" in a long time, and it's a little sad to wrap it up. thank you to everyone that took the time to read it through! 
> 
> i say "finish" because i _might_ just add a couple drabbles later on, some gross fluff that i never got around to fitting appropriately into the story.
> 
> let me know what you think! that final conversation i played with a lot, especially with whether shaw would even participate in such a sappy discussion, but i think i like the way it turned out. thanks again, and kudos/comments are infinitely appreciated :)
> 
> edit: speaking as someone with a personality disorder, i recognize that shaw's "feelings" may not be nobly canon or accurate to the original character, OOC of sorts, and i explored a very particular version of her axis II personality disorder. by no means am i broadcasting that _this_ is what it is like, definitively, to live with a personality disorder. this is simply an exploration of one very specific perspective throughout what is a very wide, complicated spectrum of a mentality. i would be happy to discuss this point further with anyone, just say the word :)


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